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Welcome to the Projects reading room. On this page, Wikibookians can talk about subjects related to books, book projects, and other tasks here on Wikibooks that require discussion and organization.

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[edit] Wikibooks cleanup

I am mildly concerned about the current condition of Wikibooks. Don't get me wrong, this is not criticism. Rather, I am seeking specific policies and rules so that I can begin improving the situation.

  1. Sentence case vs. title case
    • I have yet to see a definite consensus. I'm under the impression that books and their cats. use title, and subjects use sentence. Personally, the entire idea of case-sensitivity irks me, but here's my question: is it policy? It seems to me that every page kinda has its own style.
  2. Bookshelves
    • I don't know exactly where, but I thought I saw something saying that bookshelves are deprecated, use subjects instead. Why are they still here? Can't we delete them, or at least remove all links to them? Also, what is a department? It looks like a bunch of bookshelves to me.
  3. Naming convention
    • Should colons be eliminated from names? If so, why don't the old names get deleted?
  4. Subject pages
  5. Featured books
    • Zine making or maybe Zine Making is a featured book. Yet, I have never seen it on the front page, or on the featured book page. Did it's author lie about the featured book status, or is Zine Making out of sight for a reason?
    • High School Mathematics Extensions. Take a peek. It's very disorganized, somewhat incomplete, inconsistent in style and organization, etc. etc. etc. Also, it violates naming convention. Several subpages are directly in the main namespace, starting with HSE in the title, no slashes or hierarchy. I think I saw colons in a few page names, but maybe it was a different book.
      • I haven't "been bold" and fixed it because of my above question: does the old, NC-violating page get deleted?

The list goes on. These aren't really specific concerns, but rather an expression of my general confusion towards the organization of the entire project.

Whew, that's a lot! Again, I'm not criticizing. These are all issues that I would be happy to take on. The problem is that I don't know what the actual rules are. I'm clueless. So, I would appreciate some concrete policies so that I can begin. I don't want to, for example, recategorize a hundred pages only to discover that I did it wrong and made a mess and wasted my time. Mr. NMC (talk) 22:59, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

On #1: It would seem that official policy is title case, or at least that's what I took away when I consulted Wikibooks:Naming_policy. I won't speak to community consensus, though. On #4: I've been trying to eliminate all pages in Special:UncategorizedPages and the difference I see between {{Subject|Blah}} and [[Category:Blah]] is that the former puts the book into a category of its own name and the names to the right of the pipe are additional categories it will be filed in. Using the former I would see "Subjects: BookNameAsCategoryName | Blah" at the bottom of the page which link to [[Category:BookNameAsCategoryName]] and [[Category:Blah]]. That's just the Subject template versus the Category namespace. Looking at the Subject namespace versus the Category namespace, your point that Subject:Chemistry and Category:Chemistry are different was a surprise to me until I looked into things further. I was thinking Subject was a pseudonym for Category, like File and Image because of the label that shows up on the bottom of a page that has been filed into a category. But I see that they are indeed different. Looking at the code, adding a page to [[Category:Chemistry]] will get it to show up on the Subject page under Chemistry books. Any pages in [[Category:Chemistry]] and [[Category:Books with print version]] show up in the respective section on the right of the Subject page. Same with books in [[Category:Chemistry]] and [[Category: Books with PDF version]]. On Wikibooks:Card_Catalog_Office there are options to browse by Subject and browse by Category. Browsing by Subject presents the user with a prettier layout, yet the pages listed on a Subject page are not in alphabetical order, yet those on a Category page are. Those on a Category page are in alphabetical order, but you can't see which have printed and PDF versions and which are featured books. Don't know if I added to the confusion or cleared things up, but that's my take as a newer user of Wikibooks. Adrignola (talk) 00:04, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply (and your efforts to help). I was once going to try categorizing the Special:UncategorizedPages, but this underlines my concern. What if, Adrignola, you spend hours and hours categorizing hundreds of pages. Then, we decide that some categories need their names changed to/from title case. Now you just wasted all of that effort because many pages will need recategorization. That's why I haven't done much to help clean up. I'm waiting for official decisions to determine exactly how things should be done. Then, we can be confident that our efforts won't be wasted.
Also, what if you categorize books one way, and I categorize another. Then Wikibooks will be inconsistent. So, I'm looking for a "plan of attack" that everyone can agree on before I spend too much time on stuff like this. Mr. NMC (talk) 00:43, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Having a consistent categorization scheme that has community consensus would be nice. I think people do end up often times working against each other when categorizing pages. If you look at Wikibooks talk:Categories you can see that there has even been issues in the past on whether Wikibooks should even require that pages be categorized. However I think most people do agree that categorizing pages and books is helpful. From time to time this discussion comes up. From time to time I try to work on Wikibooks:Categories to make it better in hopes addressing specific issues and in hopes that eventually there will be something people can agree too. I think it does a good job of explaining what the general idea is. There are still some things like what the casing should be for categories, should categories use singular or plural case, etc. In an ideal world books would use more descriptive names and there wouldn't be any conflict with subject names, but often times books simply use the name of the subject. I think using sentence case for categories is a good way to avoid conflict with book categories in most cases. --darklama 01:04, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


You're right about the waste it would be to categorize incorrectly. I'll stick to only putting subpages that are in Special:UncategorizedPages into categories equal to their book name until this is figured out. I did further analysis of your points to come to that decision and I'll share my thoughts below.
Thank you for helping us organize our books.
I wish the answers to all your questions were all clearly explained on some "guideline" page. If you do figure them out, could you help us write such a guideline page? Or at least tweak Wikibooks:Card Catalog Office, Wikibooks:CCO Resources, and Wikibooks:Categories to make things more clear to the next person who tries to help us organize our books?
There is no clear root level. The root category is Special:Categories. So the structure of the categories isn't matching the structure of the subjects or vice versa. And how is that a problem? Have you considered that maybe the two structures don't need to match up? maybe we don't need to organize our books into a strict hierarchy, since hierarchy can be considered harmful ?
Thank you again for helping future readers find books more easily.
--DavidCary (talk) 15:09, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
Those 3 pages have been tweaked recently in an attempt to make things more clear to the next person who tries to help. Special:Categories isn't a category let alone the root category. It just lists all categories that something in it, even if that category hasn't been created yet. With some recent changes Category:Categories could be considered the root category now. There has been some attempts to eliminate confusion about which category is the root category. I would agree there isn't a need for subject pages and categories to match exactly structurally, but some consistency between the two can't hurt. Like if subject A is considered related to subject B, then the same could be considered true for the categories, even if how the categories relate might be more defined or more degrees apart. I also agree that thinking of the category system as a hierarchy can be harmful. I like to think of the category system as more like a web or matrix rather than as a hierarchy. --darklama 16:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Layman's Guide to Cellular Automata

The module on Cellular Automata is geared towards a mathematical, academic approach; I'd like to start putting together a module that everyone can enjoy with little mathematical background. The existing text also solely focuses on 1-dimensional CAs, I'd like to briefly touch on them but mostly focus on 2D and 3D versions that people can wrap their eyes around, and mainly generate interest to the point where readers may want to start looking into the deeper mathematical aspects. If it's successful I may spearhead a similar project on fractals.

A few points of discussion before I start the module, though:

  • The name: Just looking for general opinions on it
  • Some minor discussion of math is necessary in places, what level of math education should this require/target?

Xerol Oplan (talk) 22:09, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Can you do the discussion in 8th grade math?

I don't know what standard others use for Laymen, but my father who was a teacher always suggested aiming at a grade 8 audience.--Graeme E. Smith (talk) 05:20, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
Grade 8 is the standard for adult readers outside their area of expertise. If you're writing for mathematicians a grade 8 level would be insulting, but for adults who don't specialize in math it'll be a good level and that generalizes to most areas.  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 01:13, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
Sounds like a good plan then. My own mathematical expertise isn't much beyond calculus so discussing it on that level would be a stretch for me, and as I mentioned the primary purpose is to get people interested if they otherwise wouldn't be. A minor technical consideration: It may be better to demonstrate some concepts interactively, say through an applet of some sort. Many of the concepts are definitely best expressed animated; apng support isn't too widespread yet so it will probably use a good number of animated gifs as well (or perhaps some script trickery to use an apng where supported, and a gif where not, although this is already sounding a little too complicated). A bit of set theory wouldn't be entirely out of place either, so I may include an introduction to that as it applies here. (Even elementary coverage of set theory and logic has been, in my opinion, sadly lacking in public education during my lifetime, and deserves a place in any curriculum that also introduces algebra and geometry.) Xerol Oplan (talk) 07:41, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Introduction to Biological Systems and Soft Condensed Matter

Hi!

I recently uploaded a book based on partial notes from a course, and will be uploading the rest in the following weeks as the course proceeds. The course itself is at the graduate/advanced undergraduate level and mostly based on a few standard textbooks, so it is certainly not original research. Also, the notes are laid out more or less in a book style rather than a learning project/teaching resource style, though they're less detailed than a good textbook. I therefore thought this was a better venue than Wikiversity. Several students in the course have agreed to add their own sections on specific topics, and I'm hoping that it will grow further.

Please take a look and tell me what you think, I would appreciate any advice and comments you may have - this is my first attempt at such a thing. I have a few specific questions/comments you may be able to help with as well:

  • I'm writing the notes in Lyx, which provides LaTeX output. I'm converting this with a python script called latex2wiki, which works pretty well for the most part, but has many bugs which I found myself repairing either manually or with vim text macros. If there's a better/easier way (and if this seems to catch on), I have several other courses I could upload.
  • Also, I don't see any way to synchronize the document between the two formats, especially as some LaTeX features are not supported by mediawiki. This is unfortunate since for PDF output, LaTeX is vastly superior. It seems like some people (for instance the book on LaTeX, which naturally couldn't be typeset by anything else) are synchronizing formats - is this done manually?
  • One specific example is footnotes, which of course don't mean much in the absence of pages. I dislike endnotes, though, and have made a template for sidenotes. I would welcome better ideas.

Guycohen (talk) 16:27, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

hi i need some projects related to glomosim (networks)

                     raj

[edit] 'Special' bookshelf doesn't contain its contents.

From the homepage the 'Special Groups' bookshelf contains the cookbook, study guides, etc but if you click on the "Special Groups" link, none of those are available from the Special groups page itself. I don't really know enough about how Wikibooks is structured to take a punt at it myself. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Special_groups_department --Irrevenant (talk) 00:44, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Corrections by A. R. Marshall 5-22-09 Geometry/Chapter 3 http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Geometry/Chapter_3 From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection < Geometry There are no reviewed revisions of this page, so it may not have been checked for quality. Jump to: navigation, search Geometry/Chapter 3 is about logical arguments. [edit] Symbolic logic An if-then statement or conditional statement is a statement formed when one thing implies another, but not necessarily the other way around. For example, if the electrical power goes out then you will not be able to use your computer. (When given premises like this, always assume they are true — conveniently ignore the fact that your computer may be a laptop with a battery). However, if you are unable to use your computer, that does not automatically mean that the power went out. It only means that the power may have gone out. But what if your computer is useable? Then we know that there is power—after all, if there wasn't, you wouldn't be able to use the computer. This is known as a contrapositive. A contrapositive is formed by turning an if-then statement around and negating both parts, and it is always true given the truth of the original statement. In order to understand contrapositives on a mathematical level, you need to know about implication. Implication is a way to phrase if-then statements to indicate that one thing implies another. It is represented by an arrow, here typeset as "→". A statement using this arrow is known as a conditional statement, because the truth of the second value is conditional on the truth of the first. Not having electricity implies not being able to use your computer. Implication statements are only false when the first condition is true and the second condition is false. If both are true, it holds. If the first condition is false, the statement is considered vacuously true no matter what the second condition is.1 You also may notice that both the conditions are negated. Negation is used to show that a condition is not true (also known as false), and is indicated by the "~" (tilde) symbol in front of the variable. Whether a given condition is true or false is known as its truth value. Note that a condition, represented by a variable, cannot be true and false at the same time. Anything that is always false is called a fallacy. Something that is always true is called a tautology. So not having electricity implying not being able to use your computer translates into symbolic logic as ~E → ~C. Symbolic logic is a system of logic using variables to represent conditions and symbols to represent the way the conditions

1 This statement is correct but the truth tables on the next page do not implement this conclusion. See my corrections in the truth tables that follow.

are related. Now that we have put our conditional statement into symbolic logic, it is easy to see that the contrapositive is C → E. You may also notice that there are other ways you can rearrange the variables and the tilde ("not" sign). One is to take the original expression and negate both sides, like you would an equation. Note that negating an already negated variable results in the removal of the not sign. This gives you E → C. This is known as the inverse; it inverts the truth values of the original statement. You also can switch both sides around, and not negate them like you would in a contrapositive. This gives ~C → ~E. This is known as the converse; it switches the values around. It's easy to see that these are contrapositives of each other, but are they the same as the original statement? No. This will be demonstrated by a truth table. A truth table is a table that accounts for all possible values (true or false) of all variables, and then gives results about whether a statement is true or false, given specific values for the variables. First, let's review the nature of conditional statements, in table form. The truth tables we'll be using will use "F" to denote a false truth value and "T" to indicate a true truth value. We'll also use the generic conditional statement, p → q. Logical Implication p q p → q F F T F T T T F T T T T Now let's look at the truth table for the original statement, inverse, converse, and contrapositive. For clarity, we'll include the negated forms of both variables. Conditionals, inverses, converses, and contrapositives p ~p q ~q p → q ~p → ~q q → p ~q → ~p F T F T T T T T F T T F T F F T T F F T F T T F T F T F T T T T Since the original statement and the contrapositive have the same truth values in all the rows, they are proven to be equal. The same applies to the inverse and the converse, which are equal to each other, but not the other two. A truth table is one way to prove a concept, and it is the only way to prove something in symbolic logic (though you don't always have to write the whole thing out). Notice, however, that if we know p and q have the same truth value (which value doesn't matter), both the original statement/contrapositive and the inverse/converse are true. That is, p → q and q → p. This can be simplified into a biconditional. A biconditional is when both a conditional statement and its converse are true, and it can be written p ↔ q.2

2 The original, uncorrected, truth tables would make p → q and q → p always biconditional and thus equivalent, which is obviously not the case.

If you know a biconditional is true, you can also use one or both of the conditional statements that go into it. A truth table is one way to prove a concept, and it is the only way to prove something in symbolic logic. We have just completed our first proof. In mathematics, proof uses logic, rather than observation, to state definitively that something is always true. (You can also prove something impossible and it's still considered proof). Something that is proved false is said to be "disproved". This most often happens when someone finds a counterexample, which is where an exception is found and the formula does not hold, or work. The standards for proof in the mathematical community are very high, but anything that is proven is known to be true beyond a doubt. Anything that is proven is considered a theorem, and may be used in the proof of other theorems. Anything that is not proven is known as a conjecture. [edit] Vocabulary •Implication - When one condition is deducible based on another. Can be written p → q, and pronounced "If P then Q". •Truth Table - A way of visually representing a conditional for all values of the variables in that conditional. •Contrapositive - The conditional created when negating both sides of an implication. Can be written ~q → ~p, and said "If not Q then not P". •Fallacy - Something that is always false. •Tautology - Something that is always true. [edit] Exercises 1) If it is raining, then the dog is inside. Create a truth table for this statement. 2) If A, B, and C are the angles formed by a triangle, then A + B + C = 180° Create a truth table for this statement. (Advanced students will note that this isn't always true for non-euclidean geometries)

[edit] Geothermal Heating Book

Back in November or so, I finished a course on installing Geothermal Heat pumps, and was wondering if there was enough interest to get a book going on the subject here in Wikibooks. Geothermal heating is one of the few mature Green Technologies that has a significant ROI. These systems often pay for themselves within the first 5 to 10 years, and the equipment is guaranteed to last for up to 50 years before needing replacement if it is installed correctly. As a member of IGSHPA I may be able to get some support from the Industry Organization, and if the quality of the book is high enough it might be made available for local courses in order to increase the number of qualified installers and contractors out there. There are two major things holding this technology back, the small number of qualified installers, and the initial cost of the installation. This book might help with the first.--Graeme E. Smith (talk) 19:38, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

I have started the book at Geothermal Heating and Cooling to see where I intend to take it, look on the talk page for a discussion of possible chapters.--Graeme E. Smith (talk) 08:27, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Would Wikibooks want a compendium of churn rates?

I am trying to get wider dissemination of what I believe is a very useful resource to people who care about churn rates. When I linked to the blog from the Wikipedia article "Churn rate", the link was removed on grounds of conflict of interest and non-notability and non-expertise -- even though the blog post is cited in a published article in a respected journal. So, let me get to the point. If Wikibooks were to want this content of mine, I'll hand it over, if you think this step would then enable a link from the Wikipedia article on churn rate, which gets about 9,000 page views per month. The point is to get this resource in the hands of people who want it, while it would still be properly attributed to me. More discussion here. I'm looking forward to the response(s) here. -- Thekohser (talk) 18:02, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Some considerations. Wikibooks does have a policy on original or primary research. I notice you've been trying to find a good fit for the content, including looking at Wikisource. You may also wish to look at Wikiversity as well, which is the best home for primary research, though you cite sources in your blog and that may make it such that it is not primary research. If it's within Wikibooks' scope, you'd also have to consider where the content would go. Would it become part of an existing book or would it be developed into part of a larger book? From your blog title, maybe you'd be interested in creating a book on market research as a whole. Finally, your edits will be part of the page history and you can put yourself on an author page, but you'll have to accept that anyone could edit the information provided, unlike on your blog. -- Adrignola talk contribs 18:32, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
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